Hatchery

We have state of the art hatchery facilities here at Double Barrel Game Farm and Hatchery. Our hatchery is comprised of four main areas which include an area for the eggs to be washed and trayed, an incubator room, a hatching room and then a sorting room for shipping preparations. In all areas we maintain a very tight bio-security protocol.

Overview of the hatchery processes

Eggs are collected three times daily from our pheasant breeding areas. The eggs are transported to the egg wash building where they are initially inspected and washed. The good quality eggs are placed into trays and stored in a cooler room. The cooler room allows us to synchronize the eggs so we can once a week set the eggs into our 7 Natureform incubators which hold 21,528 eggs each. The heat and humidity in each incubator are closely monitored and the eggs are automatically turned ever hour to maintain the eggs as close to the way a hen would in the wild as possible. After 18 days in the incubator, the eggs are transferred to the hatchers. The hatchers are ran at one degree cooler and 10% higher humidity for the remaining 5 days.

We hatch April thru August, hatching 20,000-30,000 chicks each Monday. Chicks are shipped or delivered to customers in cardboard boxes that contain a nutritional supplement for transport. The boxes are well ventilated and clearly marked with handling instructions. Pheasant chicks are able to be sorted by gender at this young age.